The wall decor here is quite standard too, without many of the extra decorative stencils some Banner stores have. I can't help but notice the $20 price on those fans -- the box fans on the right (which I'm using as my comparison because I have two of that exact model) now cost nearly 50 dollars at Fred Meyer! But somehow, they still only cost $25 at Walmart (back when I first bought one in 2017, they were roughly $20 everywhere). And Kroger is the company that claims they'll bring prices down if they can get an even more dominant position by buying Albertsons/Safeway... yeah, right.
Speaking of Walmart, I'm guessing you saw the report that Walmart is closing the store at 11400 Highway 99 in Everett. There is another store less than three miles away near Everett Mall so I don't think this is going to produce any great shortage of opportunities to shop at Walmart in the area. The company seems to be blaming theft, but I've heard that line before at other locations in this area where Walmart was also clearly short-staffing the store. Short-staffing usually leads to theft. The store probably wasn't doing great business due to it being close to another Walmart, a lot of other big box stores, and Safeways. Also, there is a WinCo not too far off and, in Dallas at least where WinCo has a few stores, at least one Walmart Supercenter closed that was close to a WinCo. There is a perception that WinCo might be even cheaper than Walmart. I don't know, WinCo's stores look cheap and they don't even take credit cards so I have no interest in shopping there even if we had them in Houston. Anyway, as for the Walmart, they probably didn't go enough business to offset the costs of doing business...which includes theft at stores where these retailers have made it easy to steal.
ReplyDeleteI'm not surprised to hear that general merchandise is more expensive at Fred Meyer than Walmart. Kroger is generally pretty expensive for general merchandise, but sometimes sales and coupons do help. You never know when Randall's will have a super sale even with their reputation for high prices. This week in Houston, Randall's has a digital coupon for reams of Signature Select copy paper for $2.49 each! That is an exceptional price in modern times, Walmart wants ~$5.50 for their brand of paper and you don't even want to know what Office Depot is charging. I certainly did shop at Randall's this week to get that deal. I must say that it is a bit weird to get Safeway brand computer supplies. I guess this would have been a bit less weird when Randall's was selling OfficeMax office supplies a few years ago! Anyway, the quality looks as good as anything else and I wouldn't be surprised if the paper was sourced from the NW (it says it is from the US).
Yeah, I am in no way surprised by that store closing -- it's in quite a sketchy area (though that's true for most local Walmarts!) and is a non-Supercenter that's very close to a Supercenter (though admittedly it's a mini-Supercenter, built in an old Haggen). I would not be surprised at all to see more Seattle-area Walmarts close, since (despite them generally having the best prices, sometimes even cheaper than Costco these days) they haven't ever become particularly popular locally.
DeleteHuh, that's quite interesting -- Safeway has a (very small) general merchandise section in most of their stores, but it's extremely uncommon for them to put any general merchandise products on sale or advertise them in any way! My store recently went through a reset that cut its already-small general merchandise section down to the bare bones (though some very strange products, shoe polish being one that stood out to me, survived the reset for some reason).